The nervous back and forths and the defeatist almost theres

Staring at the empty document on my computer screen, I wonder what kind of real, legitimate substance I can write when half of my mind is on edge. I wait to hear the footsteps near my cubicle, at which point I will hit "minimize", hoping that his eye line does not reach over the cubicle walls. The stop-and-go writing - when does it ever work? It's like hearing a couple seconds of a song and then thinking about only those bars for the rest of the day. But it's never a complete song that way. And you cling to those bars as if you've accomplished knowing the whole song when, in fact, you don't know shit. It has become apparent that there is a constant surveillance around my workspace. Perhaps I am exaggerating, because that NEVER happens.

This blank page keeps staring at me and I begin to wonder if I even have anything to write on it. The fear of some exec somehow seeing the tiny browser tab at the bottom of my computer screen keeps me from writing anything - paralysis by analysis, if you will. Someone could walk by and I will minimize the page immediately, then realize they are walking on the other side of the office. Am I simply self-sabotaging? Setting up a scenario where I can say I tried to write, it was a valiant effort, but all of these extenuating circumstances kept me from doing it. Damn the man! Not my fault, right?

Then I start to wonder if I am clinging to a life, a persona, that was never mine to begin with. I was never that person, that writer. Am I clinging to a life I never had? Feels like I had this life at one point...but is it just my idealistic way of remembering it because I want to be that person? Paralysis by analysis, again. I'm just a perspiring glass clinging to a coaster.

Ahhh...that line makes me cringe.

No, write!

Bah! Minimize!

Ongoing conversations

On the walk to work I have a conversation with my mother. It's too early to answer her, but, as always, even harder to make her stop.
"How's the new job going?" she chirps, or more accurately caws.
"It's fine," I say, voice cracking right at the stroke of 7:30 a.m.
"What exactly are you doing?"
"Dry stuff, not very exciting."
"Well, do you like it?"
"It's OK. Don't understand much yet."
"What? You don't like it?"
"I said it's fine..." the bag swung around my body is getting heavier.
"You know, that's life sweetie. You better get used to it -"
"Yeah, yeah...yes. I know." I can feel the sun growing warmer.
"- Everyone has to do it. It'll get better. I know how much you like being busy and you'll feel better about yourself once you start making money -"
The birds are getting louder. "Alright mom...I understand. Enough."
"- Because no one makes a living writing right off the bat. You still need to make money to support the life your father and I have given you -"
"Yes, and it's not right if it's not your way." My teeth are grinding.
"- It's a slap in our faces when you do something like waitress to write after all we've given you with education and opportunities -"
My head is aching. "Please don't do this right before I walk in..."
"- And I know you'll like it once you see the benefits. Everyone works and nobody likes it. That's life -"
"Guess it is," I say out loud to no one in particular.

I walk into the building with my mother's words chasing after me. The hallway is grey and there is a barely audible hum from the fluorescent lights that flicker above. I arrive at my desk and go through the normal ritual. Bag off. Coat off. Turn computer on. Sip of coffee. Sit down. Change shoes. Sip of coffee. Stare at screen. Coffee. I reach into my bag to take out a pen.

"Damnit," I silently curse. Left my phone at home.

On finding the balance between the dank and the light

Charles Bukowski, "The Dirty Old Man," sums up much of the push-pull argument I have with myself in this post-graduate, job-centric period of life in his poem "The Laughing Heart." The fact that Tom Waits reads it is just the cherry. This poem is optimistic and idllyic, which somewhat counters, I feel, Bukowski's "dirty realist" outlook on life. The words show his romantic and hopeful side. He communicates that side of me, and the countless others who have goals that don't fit within the harsh confines of the working world.

Everything is being digitized and monetized. Everything is getting faster. People want fast and cheap. Attention spans are diminishing. Modernized working skills are what outfit the fittest in this new society. Sometimes it feels as though old art forms are fading into the irrelevant. Ambitions are replaced with anxiety and panic attacks over making a living. Ambitions are redirected. Reading "The Laughing Heart" calms me and instills an individualist pursuit to find more in life. Or at least to find a balance that satisfies the laughing heart. I find that Bukowski submits to the fact that without work we cannot live, and the starving artist persona is not at all attractive. He implores the reader to be on the watch for opportunities that afford a little light.

When I first heard of the writer's gravestone reading: "Don't try" I thought he must have believed himself to be a failure - that writing more often than not dead ends. "The Laughing Heart" corrects this assumption, saying that you should know what makes you happy, do it, and look for the opportunities that illuminate the happiness. It may not even lead anywhere, but at least it gave your shitty life a little bit of spark.

The office dead

She was lurching closer, albeit at a slow pace and with a bit of a tired limp, but still progressing on a sure and definite path. From where I stood I could still see a glimmer of remembrance, a subtle nod to who she formerly was before the transformation took place. Difficult to pinpoint the exact moment of descent - like announcing the exact moment in which you become "old."

But at some point, her hair slackened, her coutenance became pallid, veins jutted out and she found herself walking up and down the same hallway without purpose or conviction. Perhaps some twenty-five years ago she saw herself doing something more romantic with her life than succumbing to the nine-to-five plague. Contagious and difficult to avoid without the financial backing to get you out of it.

I wondered if she was still the same inside, having the same thoughts about moving to Europe and writing a modern neo-noir screenplay. A slight wrinkled appeared between her eyes, perhaps when thoughts of the man that was once in her life seared through her brainless waves and she wondered what leaving this city with him would have been like. Leaving the security of stable income and demanding family behind. Sometimes I saw a lustful color in her greyish black eyes. Then I remembered her dream had died long ago.

And she approached closer. I could hear the scratching of her nylon thighs rubbing against one another. Her jaw hung slackly in a silent "o" - perhaps a disguised cry for help from the soul that still existed inside. I continued to stare at my computer screen, nervous and still in the hopes that she wasn't coming for me. But she was standing over me now.

"Did you get your name plate yet?"

I turned around and looked up at her expressionless face and red stained teeth. "No Mary, not yet."

She nodded her head and slowly turned to walk back the way she came. I relaxed a bit and turned back to my computer. Must suck to do the same thing day after day, I thought as I sent off another excel spreadsheet.

I felt my eyes glaze over.

The beginning is just the end working backwards

A tingling sensation snakes its way up my arm and I know that this is the end. This is how I go at age twenty-four.

I didn't even make it to my 25th birthday. Such a shame...it really, really fuckin' sucks. I can feel this abysmal black's engulfing grin devouring me in one gulp, it's all so tragically emo. The freezing hot wash of nausea. The intense disgust. And my book had never been published! It still remained in the dusty back files of my flash drive, becoming lame with every passing year of irrelevance. Without the ego-boosting of a publication, I couldn't look at the stories anymore for fear of self-deprecation. For writing such banal drivel. How do you know when something is truly good? Or even just done?

My reflection says it all. Dark navy pleated pants that sit awkwardly on my hips - not quite high enough to be in-style and not low enough to be comfortable. I feel bloated. They know exactly where to pinch the hip paunch so as to remove any inclination of attractiveness, and to make the wearer conscious of being unattractive. Underwear lines protrude through the pocket-less back, like they're at war with the pants for ugly domination. There's a lot to be said for the security a hooded sweatshirt affords a person.

My image blurs and then buckles.

I'm sitting on the end of my bed. I tried right? Got a stack of rejection letters to prove that. But that doesn't pay the bills, right? Maybe I am a bad writer. It's easy to have a misplaced sense of superiority when you're sitting in a fiction workshop class with frat and sorority kids who write about their wild stripper/keg parties. "It was fuckin' crazy man!"

I look up at the image in front of me one more time, but it's washed away. The room is quiet in the early morning hours, except for the muffled pleas to not be such a failure.

The back and forth argument is confusing. I have a degree, shouldn't I use it? I need to make mom and dad proud after everything they've done for me. Everyone hates their job and why should I be different? That's life. Writing's not a real job. You can't make any money from writing.

It's surprisingly easy to submit to this argument. The practical choice. The "I won't look like a loser at family gatherings" choice. The choice that washes you in the warm glow of approval after telling your parents. I suppose it feels like the "adult" decision and the one that's needed to make after two years of drifting. I'm just being a baby. Yet here I am now. Exposed. Crying. Uncomfortable. But, see, that's the argument! Right there!

I look at myself again. Makeup stains around my eyes and down my cheeks. Sad and pathetic. Pretty comical in retrospect.

Fuck me...it's only the first day.

You really are buried in a suit.